The Los Angeles Dodgers

The Los Angeles Dodgers are a professional baseball team located in Los Angeles, California. The Dodgers are members of the National League West division of Major League Baseball (MLB). Established in 1883, the team originated in Brooklyn, New York, where it was known by a number of nicknames before becoming the Brooklyn Dodgers definitively by 1932.[1][2] The team moved to Los Angeles before the 1958 season.[3] They played their first four seasons in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum before moving to their current home of Dodger Stadium, the third-oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball (after Fenway Park and Wrigley Field).

The Dodgers have won six World Series titles and 21 National League pennants. Eight Cy Young Award winners have pitched for the Dodgers, winning a total of eleven Cy Young Awards (both MLB records). The team has also produced 12 Rookie of the Year Award winners, including four consecutive from 1979–1982 and five consecutive from 1992–1996, the longest consecutive streaks in Major League Baseball.

History
In the 20th century, the team, then known as the Robins, won league pennants in 1916 and 1920, losing the World Series both times, first to Boston and then Cleveland. In 1941, as the Dodgers, they captured their third National League pennant, only to lose again to the New York Yankees. This marked the onset of the Dodgers–Yankees rivalry, as the Dodgers would face them in their next six World Series appearances. Led by Jackie Robinson, the first black Major League Baseball player of the modern era; and three-time National League Most Valuable Player Roy Campanella, also signed out of the Negro Leagues, the Dodgers captured their first World Series title in 1955 by defeating the Yankees for the first time, a story notably described in the 1972 book The Boys of Summer. Following the 1957 season, the team left Brooklyn. In just their second season in Los Angeles, the Dodgers won their second World Series title, beating the Chicago White Sox in six games in 1959. Spearheaded by the dominant pitching style of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, the Dodgers captured three pennants in the 1960s and won two more World Series titles in 1963, sweeping the Yankees in four games, and 1965, edging the Minnesota Twins in seven. The 1963 sweep represented their second victory against the Yankees and first against them as a Los Angeles team. The Dodgers won four more pennants in 1966, 1974, 1977 and 1978, but lost in each World Series appearance. They went on to win the World Series again in 1981, thanks to pitching sensation Fernando Valenzuela. The early 1980s were affectionately dubbed "Fernandomania." In 1988, another pitching hero, Orel Hershiser, again led them to a World Series victory, aided by one of the most memorable home runs of all time, by their injured star outfielder Kirk Gibson coming off the bench to pinch hit with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of game 1, in his only appearance of the series.

The Dodgers share a fierce rivalry with the San Francisco Giants, the oldest rivalry in baseball, dating back to when the two franchises played in New York City. Both teams moved west for the 1958 season. The Brooklyn Dodgers and Los Angeles Dodgers have collectively appeared in the World Series 18 times, while the New York Giants and San Francisco Giants have collectively appeared 19 times and have been invited 20 times. The Giants have won one more World Series (7); the Dodgers have won 21 National League pennants, while the Giants hold the record with 22. Although the two franchises have enjoyed near equal success, the city rivalries are rather lopsided and in both cases, a team's championships have predated to the other's first one in that particular location. When the two teams were based in New York, the Giants won five World Series championships, and the Dodgers one. After the move to California, it has almost been the reverse—the Dodgers have won five in Los Angeles, the Giants won two in San Francisco.

Team History
Brooklyn Years

The Dodgers were originally founded in 1883 as the Brooklyn Atlantics, taking the name of a defunct team that had played in Brooklyn before them. The team joined the American Association in 1884 and won the AA championship in 1889 before joining the National League in 1890. They promptly won the NL Championship their first year in the League. The team was known alternatively as the Bridegrooms, Grooms, Superbas, Robins, and Trolley Dodgers before officially becoming the Dodgers in the 1930s.

In Brooklyn, the Dodgers won the NL pennant several times (1890, 1899, 1900, 1916, 1920, 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, 1956) and the World Series in 1955. After moving to Los Angeles, the team won National League pennants in 1959, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1974, 1977, 1978, 1981, and 1988, with World Series championships in 1959, 1963, 1965, 1981, 1988. In all, the Dodgers have appeared in 18 World Series: 9 in Brooklyn and 9 in Los Angeles.

The Jackie Robinson Era

For most of the first half of the 20th century, no Major League Baseball team employed an African American player. Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play for a Major League Baseball team when he played his first major league game on April 15, 1947, as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers. This was mainly due to general manager Branch Rickey's efforts. The deeply religious Rickey's motivation appears to have been primarily moral, although business considerations were also a factor. Rickey was a member of The Methodist Church, the antecedent denomination to The United Methodist Church of today, which was a strong advocate for social justice and active later in the Civil Rights movement.[4]

This event was the harbinger of the integration of professional sports in the United States, the concomitant demise of the Negro Leagues, and is regarded as a key moment in the history of the American Civil Rights movement. Robinson was an exceptional player, a speedy runner who sparked the team with his intensity. He was the inaugural recipient of the Rookie of the Year award, which is now named the Jackie Robinson Award in his honor. The Dodgers' willingness to integrate, when most other teams refused to, was a key factor in their 1947–1956 success. They won six pennants in those 10 years with the help of Robinson, three-time MVP Roy Campanella, Cy Young Award winner Don Newcombe, Jim Gilliam and Joe Black. Robinson would eventually go on to become the first African-American elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.

Moving to LA

Real estate businessman Walter O'Malley had acquired majority ownership of the Dodgers in 1950, when he bought the shares of his co-owners, Branch Rickey and the estate of James L. Smith. Before long he was working to buy new land in Brooklyn to build a more accessible and better arrayed ballpark than Ebbets Field. Beloved as it was, Ebbets Field was no longer well-served by its aging infrastructure and the Dodgers could no longer sell out the park even in the heat of a pennant race (despite largely dominating the league from 1946 to 1957).

O'Malley wanted to build a new, state of the art stadium in Brooklyn. But City Planner Robert Moses and other New York politicians refused to let him build the Brooklyn stadium he wanted. During the 1955 season he announced that the team would play seven regular season games and one exhibition game at Jersey City's Roosevelt Stadium in 1956. He expected that this move would put pressure on the city's politicians to build the Dodgers the park he wanted in Brooklyn.[5] Yet Moses and the others considered this an empty threat, and did not believe O'Malley would go through with moving the team from New York City. That is when Los Angeles came into the picture.

After teams began to travel to and from games by air instead of train, it became possible to include locations in the far west. When Los Angeles officials attended the 1956 World Series looking to entice a team to move to the City of Angels, they were not even considering the Dodgers. Their original target had been the Washington Senators (who would in fact move to Bloomington, suburban Minneapolis, to become the Minnesota Twins in 1961). When O'Malley heard that LA was looking for a club, he sent word to the Los Angeles officials that he was interested in talking. LA offered him what New York would not: a chance to buy land suitable for building a ballpark, and own that ballpark, giving him complete control over all revenue streams. When the news came out, NY Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. and Moses made a feeble effort to save the Dodgers, offering to build a ballpark on the World's Fair Grounds in Queens. Wagner was already on shaky ground, as the New York Giants were getting ready to move out of the crumbling Polo Grounds. However, O'Malley was interested in his park only under his conditions, and the plans for a new stadium in Brooklyn seemed like a pipe dream. Walter O'Malley was left with the difficult decision to move the Dodgers to California, convincing Giants owner Horace Stoneham to move to San Francisco instead of Minneapolis to keep the Giants-Dodgers rivalry alive on the West Coast. There was no turning back: the Dodgers were heading for Hollywood.[5]

The Dodgers played their final game at Ebbets Field on September 24, 1957, which the Dodgers won 2–0 over the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The LA Years

The Dodgers were the first Major League Baseball team to ever play in Los Angeles. On April 18, 1958, the Dodgers played their first LA game, defeating the former New York and now new San Francisco Giants, 6–5, before 78,672 fans at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Catcher Roy Campanella, left partially paralyzed in an off-season accident, was never able to play in Los Angeles.

Construction on Dodger Stadium was completed in time for Opening Day 1962. With its clean, simple lines and its picturesque setting amid hills and palm trees, the ballpark quickly became an icon of the Dodgers and their new California lifestyle. O'Malley was determined that there would not be a bad seat in the house, achieving this by cantilevered grandstands that have since been widely imitated. More importantly for the team, the stadium's spacious dimensions, along with other factors, gave defense an advantage over offense and the Dodgers moved to take advantage of this by assembling a team that would excel with its pitching.

Since moving to Los Angeles, the Dodgers have won nine more National League Championships and five World Series rings.

Uniforms
The Dodgers uniforms have remained relatively unchanged for over 70 years. The home jersey is white with "Dodgers" written in script across the chest in Dodger Blue. The road jersey is gray with "Los Angeles" written in script across the chest in Dodger Blue. The word "Dodgers" was first used on the front of the team's home jersey in 1933; the uniform was white with red pinstripes, and the stylized B on the left shoulder.[16] The Dodgers also wore green outlined uniforms and green caps throughout the 1937 season but reverted to blue the following year.

The current design was adopted in 1939, and has remained the same ever since with only minor cosmetic changes. Since 1952, the home uniform has had a red uniform number under the "Dodgers" script. The road jerseys also have a red uniform number under the script. The most obvious change is the removal of "Brooklyn" from the road jerseys and the replacement of the stylized "B" with the interlocking "LA" on the caps in 1958. In 1970, the Dodgers removed the city name from the road jerseys and had "Dodgers" on both the home and away uniforms. The city script returned to the road jerseys in 1999, and the tradition-rich Dodgers flirted with an alternate uniform for the first time since 1944 (when all-blue satin uniforms were introduced). These 1999 alternate jerseys had a royal blue top with the "Dodgers" script in white across the chest, and the red number on the front. These were worn with white pants and a new cap with silver brim, top button and Dodger logo. These alternates proved unpopular and the team abandoned them after only one season. In 2014, the Dodgers introduced an alternate road jersey: a gray version of the home jersey (w/the Dodgers script).